‘Baby Shaker’ app: why it’s not funny

When San Francisco lawyer Christopher Keane read a news story about the new Apple iPhone application “Baby Shaker,” which allows you to shake a baby to death to quiet its crying, he was horrified.

“When the story popped up in my Google Alerts, I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” Keane says. “I thought it was outrageous. Shaking babies is nothing to joke about. There’s nothing cute about it. I can’t see how this got through at Apple.”

For Keane the application, which was available for three days and then recalled, was particularly disturbing because he defends children in abuse cases. Currently, he is working on six cases in which babies are victims of Shaken Baby Syndrome.

“I just hope the people who created that application don’t have children and that they have never met a baby who has been shaken,” Keane says. “Anyone who has ever seen or cared for a child who has been affected by Shaken Baby Syndrome, and witnessed what their little lives are like with irreversible brain damage–would not even begin to associate it with a joke, game, application or anything other than complete sadness. The only good that can come from something like this is once again reminding people that it is never OK to shake a baby.”

Many experts believe that Shaken Baby Syndrome occurs when an exasperated parent or caregiver violently shakes a baby, whose neck muscles are too weak to hold his head steady, exposing the fragile brain to potentially overwhelming injury. Most often the adult’s actions are triggered by a baby’s uncontrollable crying.

An estimated 1,400 to 1,600 babies are hospitalized every year in the United States, according to Marilyn Barr, founder and director of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome in Ogden Utah. Of those babies, 25 to 30 percent die. Of the ones who live, 80 percent suffer from lifelong disabilities.

“These children can’t walk, they can’t talk,” Barr says. “They have to be fed by their parents. They live in a vegetative state. Some are blind. Some get cerebral palsy. These kids don’t have long life expectancies.”

These numbers are only the tip of the iceberg. Barr says abused children have to be hospitalized to be counted. Many babies are shaken and go unreported. These kids have less-obvious injuries and might struggle with learning disabilities, seizure disorders, developmental delays, personality changes, behavior problems, and mild mental retardation.

When a baby is shaken, many experts believe that the brain hits against the inside of the bony skull, destroying or injuring brain tissue. Blood vessels feeding the brain can be torn, which leads to bleeding around the brain. The blood sometimes pools within the skill, creating more pressure within the head and eyes. Retinal (back of the eye) bleeding is common. The brain of an infant or child is soft because it has more water content and it is easier to injure than an adult brain. Therefore, less energy is required to cause lethal injury to a baby’s brain.

In most cases, it is expected that a caregiver shakes a baby for 5 to 10 seconds, but studies haven’t been able to pinpoint specifically how long it takes to injure a child. Barr says that any amount of shaking is risky. Babies under 6 months are the most common victims. Studies indicate that men shake babies more frequently than women. Barr says that men tend to thrash with more force than women, so these babies are more likely to end up in the hospital. Often adults abuse babies because they’re stressed, depressed, feeling inadequate, taking drugs, or unemployed.

Barr has worked in the field of child abuse since 1978 and she says the iPhone application sends the exact opposite message that she has been trying to communicate to the public for years. “Here comes along this application that’s telling you to shake the crying baby until it dies,” Barr says. “We’re telling parents and caregivers to put a crying baby in a safe place and then walk away, take a deep breath, calm yourself down, get your composure. The last thing you should do is shake a baby–you never ever want to shake a baby. The application was a very cruel joke to parents of children who have been shaken and severely injured. I think Apple as a well-recognized international company has a moral obligation to not advocate child abuse.”